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Title: Experience AI: A Practitioner's Guide to Integrating Appreciative Inquiry with Experiential Learning by Miriam W. Ricketts, James E. Willis ISBN: 0-9712312-2-2 Publisher: Taos Institute Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The best of both worlds - almost.
Comment: The basic proposition of this book is very attractive. It is that the AI (Appreciative Inquiry) approach to organisation development can be accelerated, deepened, intensified and enhanced if experiential learning is embedded into the process. In the optimistic language of AI it could be said that this book sets out to combine the best of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) with the best of Experiential Learning (EL).
AI (even without any help from EL) is seen as a fast track approach to organisation development. Does EL makes AI even faster, and is there a downside to the greater speed, depth and intensity that seems to occur when AI and EL are mixed together?
Having combined AI and EL in my own work, I was particularly interested to see exactly how the authors merge these two processes and what successes they have had. Just how much they appear to achieve in events of just one or two days is impressive and is enough to make any training provider wonder how their own events match up to these achievements.
In a nutshell, the integrated process of AI and EL involves
(1) people imagining how they want things to be (the AI part) and
(2) people instantly making these imaginings come true within the 'micro-world' of the EL event. Examples of the 'micro-world' include:
* a real world community service challenge (feeding and clothing homeless people)
* a series of solution-finding tasks linked by a space fantasy theme
* building a giant physical structure that resembles the new organisational structure they wish to create.
For a book of only 80 pages the four case studies are surprisingly detailed, even if they do create an appetite for wanting to know more. The authors list 10 benefits arising from the integration of AI and EL. The benefits that EL brings include:
* impelling people into actually experiencing the best of what exists
* bringing collective dreams and aspirations to life
* transcending cultural inhibitions against "prideful speech" and "fanciful thinking"
* building critical mass as change is cascaded throughout the community
* helping the AI process to come alive kinaesthetically (creating "muscle memories" of affirmative communal futures)
It feels a bit unsporting to write about problems when a book is so deliberately upbeat and positive in its approach. But I cannot provide a balanced review without drawing your attention to some difficulties ...
I have never seen a book with so many phrases marked with the TM sign. There are nearly 20 phrases marked with TM. These include: Strategic Linking TM, Project Success TM, Process Control Review TM, Continuous Learning Cycle TM, Self-facilitated Learning TM, Self-facilitated Team Learning TM, and Team Learning Journal TM. The frequency of the TM symbol gives out a very mixed message, as if it should be entitled: "Guidebook: Do Not Use". As a reader I felt untrusted - a particular irony in a book about developing trust. I would have appreciated some reassurance or explanation about this TM epidemic.
The authors redefine the role of the facilitator - by replacing facilitators with work books! They explain that in Self-facilitated Learning TM it is the Learning Journal TM that guides the process. The Learning Journal (they say) contains everything that participants need to facilitate their own learning processes - activity frontloading, rules and debrief questions. The trouble with facilitators (they say) is that each facilitator may provide a wide variety of interpretations and may even stall progress by providing distractions. Whereas workbooks speed up the process, reduce variation, increase accuracy and produce a more comprehensive result. This substitution of facilitators with work books might be an economy but surely it is not more effective? One issue arising is the desirability of using a factory-like process for organisation development. Another issue is whether 'self-facilitated' is an accurate description of a process that is driven, steered and shaped by a work book. From the way it is described it would be more accurate to call it 'book-facilitated' or 'following instructions' rather than 'self-facilitated'.
In fairness, the authors do confront and discuss these issues. In a section on 'Standardized Experiences' they claim to be following AI on the issue of standardisation:
"Standardization of the experience is another important reason for adopting a self-facilitated learning approach. While this approach is effective with any size group, it is especially effective in large group situations wherein it is important that individuals and groups have similar experiences, as in AI." (p. 64)
So it is clear where the authors stand on this issue. Or is it? Because they later attempt to clarify where they stand on the issue of open-endedness:
"One final clarifying point about self-facilitated learning experiences: Self-facilitated learning experiences are open-ended and they are not." (p. 65)
Following this deliberate contradiction is an elaborate metaphor about a highway that I have read many times in an attempt to work out what they mean and where they stand. I think the answer is that the trainers draw the map within which participants make choices. Or it is like a multiple choice test where every choice leads to the same destination.
Perhaps I expect too much from a small book, but I would have appreciated more attention being paid to the issues associated with the kinds of practices being recommended. The tendency of providers to be upbeat about their own work is probably intensified when the process they are describing is itself particularly upbeat. Inclusion of some other voices or stakeholders would have added greater credibility and depth and would have saved it from reading, in places, like an Executive Edge brochure. I still like the basic proposition that AI and EL can be successfully combined. I particularly enjoyed the detail of the four case studies - and felt inspired by them. But the arguments for 'standardized experiences' were a bridge too far. I would like to see a message about "diversity is strength" woven into the formula.
Rating: 5
Summary: Experience This Book!
Comment: The book "Experiencing AI: A Practitioner's Guide to Integrating Appreciative Inquiry With Experiential Learning" provides a glimpse into the world of experiential/adventure-based training and development. If you work as a "helping professional"--trainer, consultant, educator, therapist--this book introduces you to the practice of Appreciate Inquiry and experiential/adventure training in a short, concise, and easy-to-understand format.
As a seasoned organization development consultant and experiential educator, I found the book fascinating in its description of the kinds of activities and interventions the authors use with their clients, and came away energized thinking about how to incorporate some of these strategies into my own practice. I was also amazed, and to be honest somewhat skeptical, to think that you could get a group of corporate executives to fully engage and buy-in to some of the activities described in the book given the level of commitment and intellectual/creative demands they required. And yet, if what one hopes to accomplish as, say, an organizational consultant working with a senior-level management team, is a breakthrough in trust, communication and problem-solving skills, and performance, then the integration of Appreciative Inquiry with hands-on, real-world experiential activities strategically designed to mirror the kinds of workplace demands that the client faces daily seems to be a powerful and effective strategy.
My wife, who has a private counseling practice, has increasingly begun to explore and integrate both the Appreciative and experiential aspects of what this book has introduced her to into her practice, and is discovering a whole new way of engaging her clients. What is interesting, is that for both my wife and I, we have always struggled with ways to reduce our client's dependency on us as "experts," and to increase the degree to which they take ownership of not only their problems and issues (or, opportunities and dreams), but also to own and control the process of learning, growth, and discovery. Curiously, in their book, Ricketts and Willis describe a part of their organizing philosophy about just such a phenomena when talking about "transfer of learning" and the underlying dynamic tensions that exist between client and consultant.
Both of us are also exploring how to bring this into our work as university professors in relation to the training we provide students in human services, education, and business. I especially am excited about how to integrate aspects of Appreciative Inquiry into the graduate-level courses I teach on research methods, program evaluation, and organizational needs assessment.
This book has opened our eyes to new ways of seeing our work as helping professionals and educators, and we highly recommend it to beginning and seasoned practitioners.
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